Jen, a Lolita-type figure in skimpy swimwear, quickly arouses their predatory instincts. And her rape, no less shocking for playing out largely off-screen, triggers a wave of sickening violence.

Cold-blooded

Lutz, who studied Marilyn Monroe for inspiration, plays her protagonist at first as an eager-to-please, guileless ingenue, but transforms over 108 minutes into a cold-blooded killer.

“The film plays at the beginning with this representation, which it pushes to its fullest in order to switch it brutally the other way round,” Fargeat said in a statement.

Rape-revenge movies — from Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs in the 1970s to Niels Arden Oplev’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) — are made almost exclusively by men.

Fargeat says she didn’t set out merely to upset the apple cart or make a point about gender politics, describing the genre as “my kind of film.”

The violence is stomach-churning and yet feels anything but gratuitous. Every punch, shot or stab feels like it comes at a cost, spilling what looks like real blood rather than red corn syrup.

In Toronto, paramedics had to treat an audience member who suffered a seizure, according to local media, during a scene in which one character digs a jagged shard of glass out of his foot.

Lutz, a 26-year-old multilingual Italian who lives in California, told the LA Times Revenge had changed her outlook and given her confidence.

“I’ve always been strong but I’ve always felt very concerned about what other people thought of me, what my body looked like, what people were saying about my body,” she said.

“On the beach… on the street, if a man was looking at me I would either put my head down or change sides because I was scared of what might happen to me. And now, I don’t do that anymore.”